First among Europeans to reach the East by sea were the Portuguese. Opening the new route round the Cape in 1498, they quickly appreciated the opportunities of the vast maritime economy, reaching from East Africa to the Pacific, they had now entered. By force, blandishments and the adept exploitation of local rivalries they had acquired, by the time Afonso de Albuquerque relinquished the office of governor (1515), a string of posts reaching from the Persian Gulf to Indonesia. The office of viceroy was instituted in what came to be termed the ‘State of India’ and some of the familiar machinery of Portuguese royal government was introduced. But with distances so great and the resources of the Lusitanian monarchy so few the authority of the Crown was never more than feeble. Meanwhile private ambitions flourished and private wealth grew. In 1580 the king had the burdens of government and private merchants most of the profit from trade, a sure sign that overseas enterprise had failed to fulfil the hopes which members of the royal family of Portugal had put in it since the early part of the fifteenth century.

Portuguese interest in the East stemmed from hopes of a godly blow against infidels and a quest for land and riches in the eastern Atlantic and West Africa in which a vital, but by no means unique, role had been played by Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’. As governor of the military Order of Christ, the prince sent out his first explorers of the African coast in 1421. About thirty-five years later the pope granted the Order of Christ spiritual jurisdiction and freedom to trade ’as far as the Indians’. From that time, if not before, the Portuguese were probably concerned with the idea of a sea route to India. They did not find it swiftly: not till 1488 did a Portuguese vessel pass east of the Cape of Good Hope. Shortly afterwards King John II seems to have received news of ports of western India and south-eastern Africa. It now became almost certain that men could reach Asia by sea. But no Portuguese tried to do so until 1497 when Vasco da Gama set out on his first major voyage, in command of a royal fleet.

Towards the end of his reign Selīm I had been preparing for a new offensive, but no one could be sure where the blow might fall. Now, in September 1520, the great sultan was dead. As the news became known in Christendom, men felt that a dark shadow had been banished, an imminent peril suddenly dispelled. Sulaimān, the only son of Selīm, was said to be ill-versed in affairs and of a quiet nature, a prince, therefore, who would be little inclined to war. Seldom has prediction been more rash or doomed to swifter disillusionment. In 1521 Sulaimān marched against Hungary.

The campaign had been organised with meticulous care: the beglerbeg of Rumeli moved towards Sabacz, the sultan following with most of his household regiments; the grand vizier Pīrī Pasha, with a strong contingent of janissaries and ample provision of siege guns, made for the main objective, Belgrade, which Mehemmed II had tried but failed to capture in 1456. At the same time the Akinjis rode out in two columns, the one to effect a diversion against Transylvania, the other to devastate the lands between the Sava and the Drava. The fall of Sabacz and Semlin severed the routes leading to the north and west of Belgrade, so that Sulaimān was now free to assail the great fortress. Guns bombarded the walls from an island in the Danube, a fierce assault drove the garrison into the citadel, an Ottoman flotilla, sailing upstream, cut off all relief by water. The end came when dissension broke out between the Hungarians and their Serbian mercenaries, the former wishing to prolong, the latter to abandon the defence. Belgrade surrendered on 29 August 1521.

The three kingdoms of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary were among the largest in sixteenth-century Europe. Together they filled the area bounded by Germany, the Baltic, Russia and the Balkans, or, in the terms of physical geography, the basins of the Oder, Vistula and middle Danube. They occupied a central position also in respect of political development, for while they lagged behind the western European states they were in advance of Russia and Turkey. It is this central position which constitutes their historical interest: the balance of power between the landowners and the monarchy was so even throughout the century as to give to their relations, whether of conflict or co-operation, a significance that illuminates the more decisive conflicts which were at the same time being waged in the extremer parts of Europe.

The accession of Sigismund I ‘the Old’, of the Jagiellon dynasty, to the Polish throne in 1506, and of Ferdinand I of Habsburg, brother of the Emperor Charles V and already ruler of the complex of the hereditary Austrian lands, to the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary in 1526, may be said to mark the beginning of the conflict, for they both succeeded to fainéant kings against whom the landowners had virtually had things all their own way. The kingdoms to which they acceded were still medieval in the looseness of their political structure. Sigismund’s inheritance was not even in name a kingdom but a rzecz pospolita or respublica; the half-dozen duchies into which the kingdom of Poland had fallen apart in the twelfth century had not yet all been brought under the direct rule of the king, for the duchy of Mazovia was not incorporated until the failure of heirs to its last duke, who died in 1526.

The sixteenth century was an age of prophets. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin interpreted the Word of God, challenging the claim of the Roman church to its own uniquely valid interpretation. These prophets found their armed champions in Knox, Coligny and William of Orange. The Catholic church countered them with her own arms, with Loyola, with Philip II and the Inquisition. But for more than a generation, before the religious conflicts erupted into open war, the political and religious life of Europe was dominated by a very different fighter for God: The Habsburg Emperor Charles V, the last medieval emperor to whom the religious and political unity of Christendom was both the ideal purpose of his life and a practicable object of policy. ‘Caesar is not a doctor of the gospels’, wrote Erasmus in his dedication to Charles of his paraphrase of St Matthew, ‘he is their champion.’ ‘God’s standard bearer’, the emperor called himself when, in June 1535, he weighed anchor at Barcelona to wrest Tunis from the Turks.

Charles had good reasons for his belief. ‘God has set you on the path towards a world monarchy,’ said the Grand Chancellor Gattinara, in 1519. Marriage alliances and inheritance had given Charles his unique opportunity. In the fifteenth century the houses of Austria and Burgundy had become united in northern Europe, those of Aragon and Castile in the south; but the marriage of Philip of Burgundy and Joanna of Castile, in 1496, produced a similar union between the northern and southern houses only through a series of unexpected deaths.

In 1930, more than a century after independence from Spain, the status of Nicaragua as a sovereign nation was in doubt. Occupied by U.S. Marines almost continously since 1912, the country had effectively lost its political independence; indeed, a vocal minority favoured annexation by the United States. With U.S. officials responsible for most aspects of fiscal and monetary policy, Nicaragua had also lost its financial autonomy. The economy was relatively weak. The export sector (based on coffee, bananas, timber and gold) remained the driving force of the economy but lacked the dynamism of neighbouring countries: exports earned a mere $10 million a year. As a result, Nicaragua, with a population of only 680,000, had the lowest income per head in all Central America. Lack of government resources had hindered the spread of public education and the vast majority of the population remained illiterate. Moreover, the task of national integration was not yet complete. The eastern provinces bordering the Caribbean sea remained unconnected by road or rail to the capital, Managua, and the English-speaking inhabitants of the Atlantic coast, whose formal link with Great Britain had only been broken in 1894, continued to regard ‘the Spanish’ on the western side of Nicaragua as representatives of a foreign country.

By virtue of its location and unusual geographical features, Nicaragua has excited the interest of outside powers since the earliest days of Spanish colonial rule. During most of the nineteenth century after independence, it was taken for granted by interested parties that a future inter-oceanic canal would be built through Nicaragua, since the easily navigable San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua would limit major construction works to the narrow strip of land separating Lake Nicaragua from the Pacific Ocean.

In the history of twentieth-century Latin America, the Panama Canal – and the Canal Zone – have always possessed a great emblematic significance. The canal runs through the territory of a tiny Hispanic republic dependent from birth on the patronage of the United States, and for seventy-five years its operation was under exclusive U.S. control. Throughout the century the canal has been an outstanding symbol of Washington's power to dominate the weaker states of the hemisphere.

U.S. determination to control the transit across the isthmus of Central America dates from the 1840s, when the Union reached the North American Pacific seaboard. In 1846 a treaty with New Granada (Colombia) gave Washington a right of way across Panama, then a province of Colombia, in exchange for a U.S. guarantee of Colombian sovereignty over the province, and by 1855 the American-owned Panama Railroad was in business. The railway was seen by some as the forerunner of a U.S.-controlled canal, but by the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty of 1850 Britain had insisted on an equal share in any future canal project, and the attractiveness of trans-continental railroads further reduced North American canal promotion. In the event, it was the French who began work on a Panama seaway in the 1880s under de Lesseps, architect of the Suez Canal, although the venture collapsed well short of completion.

In spite of the French débâcle, U.S. pressure for a canal was sustained, most notably by advocates of naval power such as Captain Alfred Mahan and his admirer Theodore Roosevelt, and it was given a huge stimulus by the war with Spain in 1898, when the battleship Oregon had to steam from Seattle to Cuba via Cape Horn.

Although the 108,900 square kilometres of its landmass made it smaller than both Nicaragua (148,000) and Honduras (112,000), Guatemala had in 1930 the largest population in Central America (1.7 million). The capital – Guatemala City – had, however, a population of only 130,000 and the country's second city, Quezaltenango (20,000), was no more than a modest provincial town. With a minuscule manufacturing base and an export sector almost completely dominated by coffee (which generated 77 per cent of export revenue) and bananas (13 per cent), Guatemala conformed to the stereotype of a backward plantation economy in which large commercial farms coexisted with a patchwork of small peasant plots dedicated to subsistence agriculture and the provisioning of a limited local market in foodstuffs. On the eve of the depression, GDP stood at $450 million, making Guatemala's economy considerably greater in size than those of the other states of the isthmus. (The second largest was that of El Salvador, with a GDP of $227 million; the weakest, that of Nicaragua with a GDP of only $129 million.) Moreover, Guatemala still retained much of the regional political influence it had enjoyed under Spanish colonial rule, when it was the seat of civil and ecclesiastical administration as well as the centre of commerce for the entire area. Hence, although it was a decidedly small and impoverished state compared to most in Latin America, and was dwarfed by Mexico to the north, Guatemala remained the strongest power in Central America, which constituted a distinct political arena just as much in 1930 as it does today.

THE TRUJILLO ERA, 1930-61

On 23 February 1930, the government of President Horacio Vásquez in the Dominican Republic was overthrown by a coup d'état led by the commander-in-chief of the army, General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Unlike other military uprisings headed by caudillos during the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, this coup marked a definitive rupture with the traditional political order. The Dominican people were forced to submit to a totalitarian dictatorship that lasted for thirty-one years, during which the personal interests of the dictator were fused with those of the Dominican state itself. Never before in the history of Latin America had a single ruler been able to impose such a comprehensive control over the minds and properties of his people.

A nation which had endured more than a hundred ‘revolutions’, uprisings and coups d'état during the seventy years between its definitive separation from Haiti in 1844 to its occupation by the United States in 1916 was subjugated to a long-lasting tyranny capable of surviving the economic crisis of the 1930s as well as the upsurge of democratic sentiment following the Second World War and brought to an end only by the assassination of the tyrant in 1961.

The key to understanding the longevity and stability of Trujillo's thirty-year regime lies in the general disarmament imposed by the U.S. Marines, who governed the country from May 1916 until July 1924. This disarmament destroyed forever the power and influence of the traditional guerrilla leaders and made possible the establishment of a professional national police force obedient only to the central government.

Since its ‘discovery’ in 1501, the Isthmus of Panama has been a crossroads. During the Spanish colonial era mule trains carried cargo across the isthmus, connecting Spain with the Pacific. Annual fairs in the town of Portobelo on the Caribbean coast attracted agents from great merchant houses, as tons of Peruvian silver were traded for European goods. Even after the eclipse of the fairs Panama continued to thrive on commerce and shipping, in the eighteenth century still under Spanish rule and in the nineteenth century as a province of the independent republic of Colombia.

People of different backgrounds settled in Panama. The first Spaniards founded a handful of towns, divided Indians into encomiendas and farmed the best lands along the Pacific watershed. Several hundred of these families formed a rural oligarchy that was not particularly wealthy but controlled both land and people. In addition, the Spanish government designated Panama City as a key commercial and defence site in the Pacific, which it regarded as its private sea. Bureaucrats, military officers, merchants, seamen, artisans and African slaves dominated its population. Later, agents of Caribbean merchants also settled in Panama.

The colonial and nineteenth-century experience of Panama affected its history as a nation after 1903. There was an enduring tension between two elites, one rural and descended from the early settlers, often called interiorano; and another cosmopolitan, racially and culturally mixed, and based in Panama City and the northern transit port of Colón. Panama's multiple connections with the outside world brought people, capital and other benefits, yet also tied its fortunes to international economic cycles.

Mexico stands out as a paragon of political stability within contemporary Latin America. There have been no successful military coups since the nineteenth century and hardly any serious attempts since the Revolution of 1910–20. Presidential successions have become genteel negotiations within the semi-official party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which has dominated the electoral arena for more than half a century. Civilians have gained control of the ruling apparatus. Consensus appears to prevail on most policy questions, and the Constitution of 1917 – forged in the heat of armed conflict – has continued to provide the regime an aura of legitimacy. Claiming a revolutionary heritage and wielding a practical monopoly over the instruments of power, the Mexican state has appeared to function smoothly, steadily and (in its own way) efficiently. The consequent achievement of stability has thus come to be hailed as the political component of the post-war ‘Mexican miracle’.

Indeed, the perception of Mexico's political stability has imbued much of the scholarly literature on contemporary Mexico with a tacit presumption of continuity, a sense almost of timelessness. There tends to be an unspoken assumption that nothing much has changed in Mexican politics since the late 1930s, much more attention being given to the workings of the system and the mechanisms of authority than to historical events or discrete occurrences; most existing literature reveals a general, abstract quality. This may illustrate one of the implicit biases of what has come to be called ‘systems analysis’ in political science: preoccupation with the maintenance of the political system rather than with patterns of transformation. Viewed in this perspective, post-war Mexico often looks flat and one-dimensional.

After the outbreak of Revolution in 1910, Mexico experienced a decade of armed upheaval followed by a decade of political and economic reconstruction. The revolutionary campaign destroyed the old regime of Porfirio Díaz, liquidated the Porfirian army, and brought to power a coalition that was heterogeneous yet strongly influenced by forces from the north and broadly committed to a project of state-building and capitalist development. If, in regard to these broad ends, the revolutionary leadership pursued Porfirian precedents, the means they employed were markedly different, as was the socio-political milieu in which they operated. It is true that Mexico's economy had not been revolutionized by the Revolution. The old pattern of export-led capitalist growth – desarrollo hacia afuera – had not fundamentally changed. The economic nationalist leanings of the regime, expressed in the Constitution of 1917, led to wrangles with the United States, but there was no complete rupture, and U.S. direct investment in Mexico was higher in 1929 than it had been in 1910. Furthermore, despite the decline in petroleum production after 1921, the economy recovered and grew, at least until 1927. In contrast, Mexico's social and political life was dramatically changed by the Revolution, albeit in an often unplanned and unforeseen manner. The armed mobilization of 1910–20 gave way to new forms of institutional mobilization: peasant leagues, trade unions and a mass of political parties, left and right, great and small. The result was not a decorous liberal politics, such as Francisco Madero had advocated in 1910; but neither was it a closed, personalise, autocratic system of the kind Díaz had maintained to the end.

In the first century after independence from Spain Honduras fought a mainly unsuccessful battle to overcome the constraints on national integration imposed by its geography. The country's high mountains and narrow, steep-sided valleys had crippled internal communications, inhibited agricultural development and produced a marked localism in national politics. In the late 1920s, the land frontiers with Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua were all still in dispute, leading to occasional military conflict, while the lack of national integration encouraged neighbouring governments to intervene in Honduran affairs. Even the off-shore territories were subject to the same centrifugal tendencies; the Bay Islands, recovered from Great Britain in 1860, remained largely autonomous, sovereignty over the Swan Islands was disputed with the United States, and possession of several islands in the Gulf of Fonseca was contested with El Salvador and Nicaragua. The country's difficulties were compounded by the size of its population. The 1930 census estimated the number of inhabitants at 854,184, giving a population density of less than 20 per square mile. The overwhelming majority were scattered throughout the rural areas, leaving the capital Tegucigalpa with a mere 40,000 souls. Large areas of eastern Honduras were virtually uninhabited.

Geography had given a different twist in Honduras to the liberal reforms which swept Central America from the 1870s. While Liberal caudillos implemented and participated personally in programmes to foster coffee and other agro-exports in the neighbouring republics, in Honduras Presidents Marco Aurelio Soto (1876–83) and Luis Bográn (1883–90) emphasized mining, both becoming shareholders themselves in newly formed companies.

Fulgencio Batista had been the dominant figure in Cuban national affairs for a quarter of a century. He had ruled Cuba, directly or indirectly, since the military coup of 4 September 1933, except for an interlude of Auténtico rule from 1944 to 1952. He had seemed confident and powerful until the last weeks of his last presidency. But suddenly Batista was gone. On New Year's Eve 1958 he quit, taking with him much of the top echelon of his government. A new leader, young and bearded, who for two years had led a guerrilla war in eastern Cuba, gradually spreading the influence of his forces to the western provinces, slowly assuming the leadership of the urban and the rural resistance to the Batista regime, marched into Havana. Audacious and effective in his military campaign and political skills, persuasive and commanding in his public speech, Fidel Castro had become the leader of the future. Power had passed, somewhat unexpectedly, to a new generation of Cubans.

In January 1959 the old regime collapsed in Cuba and a revolution came to power. The old rules of the game no longer applied and the armed forces that had shaped the life of independent Cuba for so long had crumbled. The rebel army became the defender of the new revolutionary state, sweeping aside the parties that had structured political life in previous decades. Only the Communist party (Partido Socialista Popular, PSP), which had been banned by Batista in the 1950s but reappeared in 1959, was left intact.

The establishment of stable nation states and permanent economic links with the world market through agricultural – especially coffee – exports took place in Central America during the second half of the nineteenth century. This process occurred first and most successfully in Costa Rica; later, and after much bloodshed, in Guatemala and El Salvador; and belatedly and incompletely in Honduras and Nicaragua. The backwardness inherited from the Spanish colonial period, the cyclical crisis in the international coffee market and the political struggles of the oligarchy for control of the government all slowed down economic growth, social progress and the development of institutional stability. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the twentieth century important changes had taken place in social stratification with the appearance of a coffee bourgeoisie and a small urban middle class, and political life was stable, though not democratic.

In 1914 the total population of Cental America was a little under 4 million, of whom nearly 60 percent lived in Guatemala and El Salvador. The basis of society – the agrarian structure – had three characteristics: large coffee estates controlled by national farmers producing for export; banana plantations, foreign-owned, with a vertically integrated production and marketing structure tied directly to the North American market; and small landholdings belonging to peasants who cultivated basic grains and other products for their own consumption or to satisfy internal demand. (Coffee and bananas accounted for 80 per cent of Central American exports.) The labour market was composed of mozos colonos, farmhands tied to the coffee haciendas by lifelong indebtedness; agricultural workers on U.S.-owned banana plantations; and – the largest sector – peasant smallholders, sharecroppers and migrant day-labourers who worked for wages during the harvest season.